Kaizen Culture

A Kaizen Culture is Built on Three Pillars:

Engaged Leadership

Habits and Behaviors Drive Improvement

ConsistentMethodology

Your Improvement Process Matters

EnablingTechnology

Empower Leaders To Be More Effective

Like the three legs of a stool, each of these components is absolutely required to sustain a kaizen culture. Take away one of the legs of a three-legged stool, and it will topple right over. Likewise, all three of these elements are necessary to support a kaizen culture.

Every single organization that has come to us struggling with establishing or maintaining an improvement culture is failing, for one reason or another, to nurture at least one of these three components. Leadership, methodology, and technology support each each other in an intricate, codependent dance that has been mastered by the best continuous improvement organizations.

Effort in developing a methodology and engaging leadership is wasted without a technology platform to support the two. Methodology and technology will get you nowhere without leadership engagement, and leadership coupled with technology lacks the structure to succeed without methodology.

Read on to learn about the role of each of these three elements in starting, spreading, and sustaining a successful kaizen culture.

KaiNexus takes a lot of the burden of improvement off of our managers while increasing transparency and communication for everyone.Tania Lyon

We've seen both the rate of improvements coming in and the rate of change accelerate month-over-month with KaiNexus.Matthew Cannistraro

We've identified over 1600 improvements with KaiNexus, and implemented over 75% of them with an impact of nearly two million dollars.Ron Smith

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Engaged leadership is arguably the most important determinant of success when it comes to creating a kaizen culture. Organizations with leaders who invest in employee engagement and enabling technology, and also consistently implement a regimented improvement methodology, succeed in continuous improvement.

One of our customers, experienced the difference that engaged leadership makes first hand. When her organization was first attempting to develop a Lean culture, employees “felt like we had the drive, and the passion, but we had it from a grassroots level; we didn’t have the support from above. If we didn’t have that from above - if [the VP] didn’t think it was important - we weren’t going to be able to drive it.” And they weren’t able to drive it, until a new VP came along who devoted his time and energy into promoting a culture of continuous improvement. Under his leadership, the company achieved over $7 million of financial impact through continuous improvement in 2014. You can read more about this organization's Lean journey here.

8 things leaders should do to promote a kaizen culture:

Lead by example; participate in continuous improvement openly and with gusto

Talk about the importance of kaizen with everybody, every chance you get

Consistently ask for ideas for improvement and respond quickly to those ideas

Empower employees to make daily continuous improvement a part of their own work

Don’t only ask for ideas that directly affect the bottom line or meet a certain ROI threshold

Emphasize the importance of small, incremental improvement - don’t make every improvement be an event or a project

Improvement Methodology

Establish a Process That Spreads and Sustains Momentum.

Simple

Create a methodology that is simple enough for everyone to participate without extensive training.

Consistent

Get everyone speaking the same language for a unified kaizen culture.

Disciplined

Make improvement a part of everyone's job. Strive for every person improving every task, every day.

Simple

One problem a lot of organizations face when trying to create a kaizen culture is that they over engineer everything. What does that look like? You might be making your improvement methodology too complicated if:

You require such precise (or large) impact calculations that no one ever reports an impact on any improvement ideas

Every person in your organization needs a lot of formal training before getting engaged in kaizen

You have 22 spreadsheets that you email back and forth with progress updates

You need a meeting to approve ideas before people can start making improvements. Double whammy if that meeting has to be scheduled far into the future

Process changes are only implemented if they shoot for “perfect,” rather than simply “better”

Organizations that succeed in spreading a culture of continuous improvement do so because their methodology is simple. Employees know enough about the chosen continuous improvement discipline to find opportunities for improvement, but they aren’t developed into experts in some methodology before they’re allowed to participate. People have an easy way to submit opportunities for improvement, and they’re empowered to make small improvements on their own. They have a way to calculate their impact accurately enough that the data is useful, but not so precise that it deters such reporting altogether.

Essentially, you want to make your kaizen methodology simple enough that everyone can participate with a low barrier to engagement.

Consistent

In order for your improvement methodology to be effective, you must implement it consistently throughout your organization. Managers should all get the same training regarding employee engagement, and the same strategies should be adapted for each area of the organization. This is especially important for aggregating the impact of continuous improvement from across the organization. If one group collects their impact in a complicated Excel file while another keeps a running tally on a bulletin board, leadership has no way to figure out the cumulative or comparable impact of that work.

A successful culture of continuous improvement has a structured, consistent way to:

Kaizen doesn’t play second fiddle in organizations that have mastered the cultural transformation. Every employee and leader knows that improvement is a key aspect of their job, and they approach it with the same weight and discipline as they would any other key performance indicator.

Technology is the piece of the equation that is most often missing from organizations struggling with the development of a kaizen culture. Widespread continuous improvement is difficult to manage and monitor with traditional technologies such as suggestion boxes, spreadsheets, and idea boards. Kaizen software fills that gap, connecting diverse, dispersed employees with features that enable collaboration and communication, enhance visibility, increase productivity, and enable consistent impact reporting.

Here are the features kaizen software should provide:

Structured Flexibility

Kaizen software provides a structured improvement management that is uniformly used by all employees, with the flexibility to scale and fit improvement work of all sizes and types. The software should also provide a means of storing all documents, communication, tasks, and follow up items related to a particular opportunity for improvement in a single location.

Smart Notifications

Smart notifications can come in the form of flags that are displayed in the platform itself, as well as in the form of emails that are automatically sent when something changes in the system, along with daily recaps.

- Streamlining communication- Providing a single source for improvement updates- Reducing the amount of time spent in meetings- Ensuring quick followup to questions and action items logged in the software- Sending automated reminders of upcoming due dates and overdue work to

Engagement and Impact Reports

- The overall health of your improvement program- The engagement levels of individuals, work areas, and the organization as a whole- The impact (both financial and non-financial) of continuous improvement

Built-in Recognition

Kaizen software lets you recognize employees with features such as virtual badge systems and online profiles that publicly identify each individual’s success. Software can also provide you with the information you need to take recognition one step further by identifying high-performers and recognizing them in more formal, real-life celebrations such as quarterly employee recognition ceremonies.

Broadcast Improvement

Kaizen software automatically broadcasts the results of and details about your implemented ideas. This feature encourages more people to get involved in continuous improvement, recognizes those who are making improvements, disseminates best practices throughout the organization, and ensures that each improvement has the maximum impact.

Capture Tribal Knowledge

Kaizen software gives your organization a long-term memory. The software creates an improvement knowledge repository that is accessible to anyone in the organization, and is searchable so that all future staff and leaders may benefit from that institutional knowledge. It serves as a single source of truth for all improvement work that everyone in the organization refers to with improvement questions and ideas.

Easy to Deploy

In line with keeping your methodology simple, you should select easily deployed continuous improvement software. You don’t want to start using something that will be too complicated for your average user, or require that each employee undergo massive amounts of training to get up and running on it.

Learn more about continuous improvement software in this free eBook:

A Three Tiered Approach to Improvement:

Leadership

Methodology

Technology

[WEBINAR] A Deep Dive into A3 Thinking

KaiNexus empowers leading organizations in every industry to start, spread and sustain their improvement cultures.

Wherever you are in your improvement journey, KaiNexus will help you take it to the next level with unprecedented visibility, communication, and standardization.